What is it with the Harvard Kennedy School’s “penchant for celebrating dishonorable characters?” asks Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari. First it invited (then disinvited) “the traitor formerly known as Bradley Manning” to speak. Now it’s awarded a fellowship to the “equally odious” Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger “and vehement apologist for the Tehran regime.” The school is presenting him “as dissident of sorts,” even though he “spent years viciously assailing real dissidents,” accusing them of spying for the United States. He has “a long record” of public anti-Semitism and support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, whose “pure patriotic and Shiite ideals” he’s praised. All in all, says Ahmari, this is a case of “revolting moral negligence.”
Culture critic: Science’s Boost to Pro-Life Movement

Scientific progress “is remaking the debate around abortion,” contends The Atlantic’s Emma Green. Pro-life advocates say “studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques and other advances anchor the movement’s arguments in scientific fact.” In its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court “pegged most fetuses’ chance of viable life outside the womb at 28 weeks; after that point, it ruled, states could reasonably restrict women’s access to the procedure.” Now, she says, “doctors are debating whether that threshold should be closer to 22 weeks.” And these advances are shifting “the moral intuition about abortion,” making it “easier to “apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a fetus as a creature with moral status.” The irony: “Pro-choice activists have long claimed science for their own side.”
Media critic: Reader Uproar Over NYT Pro-Trump Letters

Longtime New York Times readers were “startled, and in some cases outraged,” to see the paper’s entire editorial page Thursday filled entirely by letters from fans of President Trump — replacing “the Gray Lady’s official stances on Trump’s serial misdeeds,” reports Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast. This was “an unwelcome surprise for Trump-averse readers who depend on the Times to validate their anxiety and hostility.” Among those “caught unawares”: Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who says he learned about it only “when it started to show up online.” One vitriolic Trump critic, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, actually complained that the letters were too “articulate” — suggesting the Times should have solicited pro-Trump letters “from David Duke and other white supremacists.”
From the right: ‘Friends’ Is Now Considered Offensive

The classic TV megahit “Friends” has been given a new life on Netflix, exposing it to millennials — who don’t like what they’re seeing, says Kyle Smith at National Review. Rachel, they say, should have been fired for sexual harassment after hiring an assistant she wants to date. And what about all those fat-shaming jokes about young Monica? Cosmopolitan cites the show’s “offensive and inappropriate hand grenades.” Buzzfeed is infuriated by the “homophobic jokes” about Chandler’s drag queen dad — this, in a show whose co-creator is gay and which won a GLAAD Media Award. Says Smith: All this outrage is little more than “a Cory Booker level of manufactured anger” from a generation “more determined to find something to be offended by than anyone was in the 1990s.”
Policy experts: Why Today’s Kids Love Socialism

A recent survey found that a third of all Americans and 44 percent of millennials say they’d prefer to live under a socialist system — a result James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley at USA Today find “puzzling,” given that “socialism has proved a catastrophic failure in its remaining strongholds.” Some blame professors, which makes sense; they’re “overwhelmingly liberal and have become more so in the past three decades.” But surveys also show students do not grow more liberal during their college years. Instead, Piereson and Riley argue, campus radicalism seems to originate “in the broad category of student life that takes place outside the classroom.” In fact, “students who are occupied with classroom studies are less likely to engage in disruptive or illiberal activities on campus.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann